Postby Mulder-21 » 2007-01-30, 12:53
At long last here's the next part of the course, although it might not be as thorough as the first one.
Before I continue talking about articles, I find it just as imporant to talk about 'at vera' (to be) and begin talking about nouns.
Faroese has three genders, masculine, feminine and neuter, and nouns are divided into strong and weak nouns.
We'll begin by listing some regular masculine nouns. Later we'll introduce list feminine and neuter nouns. After that we'll introduce 'to be' in both present and past tense, the only simple tenses in Faroese. After that the accusative and dative cases will be introduced. We'll do that at the same time, since the usage of cases is almost alpha and omega in Faroese, and since the accusative often has the same form as the nominative.
Masculine nouns:
Masculine nouns are usually the easiest to identify since one way is to see if the noun has the -ur ending. This isn't always the case, but this is by far the most common masculine ending.
There are two types of -ur-nouns. Those who have -ir-plural ending, and those who have -ar-plural ending.
Examples of -ir: vinur (friend), býur (city), fyrimunur (advantage), litur (colour), seyður (sheep)
Examples of -ar: úlvur (wolf), bilur (car), bátur (boat), dreymur (dream), fiskur (fish), fuglur (bird), knívur (knife), steinur (rock)
Note, that all -aður nouns also are declined as vinur.
The way to find out which noun belongs to which group is to look at the genitive singular ending. Since genitive isn't really used in spoken Faroese, the grouping will be provided for you and all dictionaries give both the G.sg ending and the N.pl ending anyway.
-ir plural have a -ar genitive, while -ar have -s genitive.
Of course, there are some words which have -s genitive but -ir plural. These include: gestur (guest), hvalur (whale), løkur (brook), seiður (coalfish), smiður (smith), svanur (swan).
Finally, we'll list some words, whose stem vowel is umlauted. In short we're talking about u-umlaut, in which a -> ø except if the following consonant is a nasal (m or n), when a -> o. However, these changes only occur in dative plural, but I'm listing these anyway.
Examples: armur (arm), skarvur (shag (bird)), hjallur (~ barn)
In my next thread we'll look at strong feminine nouns.
Gløgt er gestsins eyga. (Føroyskt orðafelli)
Wise is the stranger's eye. (Faroese saying)
L'occhio dell'ospite è acuto. (Proverbio faroico)
Hosťovo oko je múdre. (Faerské uslovie)
Fluent: Faroese, Danish, English, German
Almost fluent: Norwegian, Swedish
Basic: Slovak (studying), Spanish
Have studied: Hebrew, Russian
Interests: Ukrainian, Romanian, Italian, Albanian, Armenian, Ossetic, Hungarian, Estonian, Baltic languages